I joined. It looks like an attempt to recreate the community from the long-since-gone ipublish.com.
The upside is it has categories for a host of genres. The downside is it has somewhat draconian rules for dealing with user’s content. I don’t know if I will submit anything, but I will be happy to participate in the community they are creating.
Watchmen is going back to the printer. Here is my response to this thread and a reader wondering why Alan wasn’t just happy to have more money:
James Van Hise,
As I understand, Alan Moore asked in the contract for Watchmen to be returned. DC agreed. It wasn’t until later he discovered the clause said the book had to go out of print first.
Whether that was sneaky and underhanded or someone needs to read contracts better, it should be pretty easy to understand why Moore would want his book back.
It is disheartening that you think Alan Moore does anything for money. Of course, that’s the problem with most people today: they think everything comes down to money when for a chosen few people, it comes down to right and wrong.
I’m not trying to be snide, but I honestly hope one day you can understand and at least appreciate the difference.
I am happy to see there is one group that’s dedicated to educating people about our right to privacy. You’d think the government would be interested in this…oh wait, both major party political candidates are in favor of spying on us…I forgot.
No our friendly neighborhood librarians recently launched a three year campaign to educate people that you don’t have to give your phone numbers to people at cash registers. Also, if you read a biography of Saddam Hussein, you don’t deserve to have your library access revoked.
Their hope is that everyone will be incensed by all this and become advocates for change. You can read more on Ars Technica.
Business Week has an outstanding article written by Shoshana Zuboff. In it, she goes to her small Maine town and asks people about the economy. All the people she talks to get it. Not only that, but they are thoughtful about it. They understand at the heart of the problem, they can only help themselves.
This is my favorite exchange:
“What about the next President?” I asked. “Will he be able to help?” They all looked at me with a mix of tenderness and pity, as if I had just spit up on my clean shirt. “The government should assist us,” Arlie said, “but we’ve given up on that. They want to pacify us, not help us.”
All these things are hitting at one time. And don’t forget the things not mentioned in this article: People like my dad who took early retirements…people who are living off shrinking 401k’s trying to make it to social security.
And what about people my age? Social security is gone. I have absolutely no faith that it will exist in 30 or 40 years when I want to retire. Our government has squandered that.
It’s important to remember that tomorrow is promised to no one, though. No one said I’d have any way to retire. My own personal 401k is in the poophole, too. Pensions no longer exist because it was too much to ask a company to take care of someone for a few years when they gave their whole life to the company.
The article also touches on something I have been harping on for a while: The complete lack of our automotive industry to innovate. Capitalism failed us. The market was supposed to push the automakers to develop better and more efficient cars. Instead it led us to the lowest common denominator. Sure, you can have heated seats or headlight defoggers, but what we really need is a solar powered car. Only DARPA finds people interested in things like that.
Living in a former communist country, every day I see how that form of government failed its people. Our govenment is failing us, too. When corruption sets in, no government serves the people.
My own parents are turning back to an old school mentality. In May, they bought chickens to cut off the price of eggs. Will it be long before they are eating those chickens to cut off increases in poultry?
Remember all those jobs lost to NAFTA? All those toys and products that Wal-Mart hooked us on from China because they were cheap and the quality was just good enough? Shipping a container from China has tripled in price since 2000. Always low prices, though. Thanks Wal-Mart for closing down the means we had to support ourselves.
We are like people I know who can’t cook, so they eat out all the time. In this illustration, though, when the prices go up, they’ve dismantled their kitchen and have no resources to rebuild it.
So I’ve been gone from Philly for almost two years. Sure, things were rough at the Comcast Network where I worked and was laid off from. Who knew that all this other drama and intrigue was simmering just off Market Street?
Alycia Lane had problems. She apparently sent photos of herself in a bikini to Rich Eisen, the head of the NFL Network. The problem is the email address she sent them to was shared with his wife. Somehow the New York Post got wind of it and Lane became Page Six fodder. 
Just as that started to cool off, she was arrested for assaulting a police officer in New York. She was subsequently released from her KYW/CBS 3 contract (which paid a reported $750,000 per year).
Now it looks like there was a pay scale induced jealous rage building inside her coanchor, Larry Mendte (who looks like a wax figure on the air). Mendte has been charged by the FBI with hacking into Lane’s emails. He purportedly leaked a lot of the information that showed up in various gossip rags!
Reported by the Philly Inquirer, Mendte accessed Lane’s email over 500 times in four months. The feds believe the spying started earlier than the March 2006 they pegged, but digital records don’t go back farther than that.